"Every trip begins with walking"

At a conference I attended recently, a transportation planner said something so elementary that I had never thought about it in this particular way.  “Every trip,” she said, referring to car trips of all sorts, “begins with walking.” In other words, we walk out the door of our houses to our vehicles. Continue the thought, and every trip ends with walking as well.

Thinking about the way we design our houses for access to our vehicles is a little silly, but imagine if you had to walk around the block to get to your garage.  What if, instead of a front walk, we exited our houses directly onto the side of a busy road, one that had no sidewalk? Or suppose we had utility poles installed right in front of our doors.

Of course, these designs would never make it to the building stage.  But it doesn’t take much looking to see them around many towns and cities. Because the focus of street design has been for so long on moving automobile traffic, we have lost sight of the elements of our everyday transportation. Next time you leave the grocery store, for example, pay attention to the atmosphere for even walking to your car. Seldom is there a dedicated pathway for us, and we must put ourselves in automobile lanes as we traverse the sea of parking lot.

And look at this failure of design:

There are so many problems here: I stood on the sidewalk –protected pedestrian way, right?—to take the picture.  The two cars that passed me felt like I was in such danger there that they moved out of their travel lane to give me more room. The two poles so narrow the sidewalk that I couldn’t get through myself without turning sideways.  Now put a stroller, or a wheelchair there. And my favorite: someone with the city decided that this spot would be ideal for the Bicycle Friendly Community sign. Was that a sense of irony, or just straight ignorance?

Or this one:

This is dismissal time at a local high school. Of course there are students walking in the street, between cars waiting to turn left, and right in front of me driving straight past the line of left turners. Not a crosswalk in sight, no traffic signal, and I didn’t see any law enforcement directing traffic.

Or how about this one:

The new sidewalk you see extends about a half mile back past an elementary school, a community park, and a library, but ends about 30 yards or so from the entrance to a subdivision.

While we do see some renovations that try to add in facilities for walking, the incompleteness almost makes it more dangerous because it may give a false sense of safety.

These failures are not permanent, but fixing them will take a conscious effort on the part of planners, designers and engineers to allow for transportation choices. Our streets can look more like this one:

Or this one:

Streets are only safe if users make them that way, through vigilance and attention, but street design works either for or against those efforts.  If we remember, and remind our policy makers and transportation folks, that we are all at some point pedestrians, then perhaps we will see improvements made that keep us all safe.